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After three years of owning a Dell Inspiron 13 (Windows Home) the computer somehow enabled Bitlocker on its own and encrypted my C: drive. Since I did not activate Bitlocker, I don't have the keys to decrypt the drive. My Microsoft account does not list any keys in it so there is no way to recover the keys as far as I know. Therefore none of the published solutions I have seen can work because they all assume that I have access to the keys. I see many similar complaints online (at least since 2018) and hundreds of "likes" so this appears to be a relatively common problem.
When booting, I see a message titled "BitLocker recovery" and it asks for the recovery key. It then says to "try your work or school account at: aka.ms/aadrecoverykey."
This suggests that the key may be associated with some active directory domain away from my computer. However, the admin account on this computer has, to my knowledge, never logged into an active directory domain, although non-admin users have. And, if the Amin account has connected to a Active Directory somewhere, I sure as heck did not give them a permission to encrypt my drive and lock me out of my computer, and give the key to some third party "work or school" account. If this is what happened, Microsoft, you have a serious security issue where third parties can effectively encrypt hard drives without permission using Microsoft's own tools. That is ransomware - without the ransom. But, this is still just a theory vaguely supported by this link https://hardsoft-support.kayako.com/article/99-windows-10-bitlocker-turns-on-without-a-notice
Here is a quote from the post: "Dell and Lenovo systems that ship with the Windows 10 operating system and are equipped with Trusted Platform Module (TPM) capability will have Microsoft BitLocker encryption enabled from the factory. It has been found that once the device is registered to a Active Directory domain - Office 365 Azure AD, Windows 10 automatically encrypts the system drive. You find this once you reboot your computer and are then prompted for the BitLocker key."
Since I don't know what possible organization could have encrypted the drive, and since I don't have admin access to them, the instructions in the article don't apply.
The laptop is Dell Inspiron 13 7370 - which I don't even think has a TPM chip built in it. BIOS is version 1.20.0. ePSA build is 4306.13 UEFI ROM.
So, Microsoft, how does this get fixed?
P.S. My other computers have Win10 Pro and and they have Bitlocker turned on, but this computer intentionally did not have Bitlocker turned on - and it was not supposed to be possible to turn on bitlocker on a Win10 Home edition. I am mentioning this to highlight that I did not "accidentally" trigger the Bitlocker being turned on - especially because it requires many steps and confirmations. The drive was simply encrypted one day with permission from me.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
And we yet to see a response from BGates and team....
Where did they get the right to intrude my privacy and steal my memories, as my drive with photos and precious data is encrypted by their system without my concent.
If they knew it was a program issue, they have the responsibility to supply the code with the computer, just like they supply you with the oem number to register the MS OS.
They cannot just shrugg shoulders
Hi,
I'm glad I'm not the only person experiencing this. I've also had the same experience. I don't open my laptop everyday, so I don't know when updates were run exactly. But on Monday (29/08/2022) when I did, I was presented with a BitLocker screen. I have never activated this. Luckily I was able to get a recovery key, but I'd like to find out how BitLocker managed to activate itself.
I did notice, that once I was able to access my machine with the recovery key, there was an update rollback that ran. And Tuesday night the machine ran BIOS updates again, but this time when it completed I was not prompted by BitLocker again.
I replied once before with the fix that I was able to come up with., but I'm not seeing it in this thread. If your computer is a personal computer and not part of a a corporate network, you are usually requested to give a user name and a password to Microsoft when you activate. In my case, My Mother in Law and Father in Law both have personal computers only. When they activated, they used their standard email account as the user name. Neither could remember the password they used and the PWs they have written down did not work. I had to set up there email on another computer and use the forgot my password option on the microsoft account login. I had to have access to their phones as well, because there is two factor ID. Once the password was recovered, I was able to login to their respective Microsoft Accounts and recover the bitlocker recovery key.
While it is true that a clean install would have restored the computers, there would be no way to recover the pictures, documents and other stuff they had stored on those machines. There were some backups that I had done and I had taught them how to run backups, but their practice of backing up was spotty. Can't blame them, they are in their late 80's. I have a major problem with Microsoft pushing out encryption hidden in an update. Encryption may be useful to most people, but those people should be making that decision, not some all powerful software company. If I thought I had the time and patience left, Id move them both onto Apple machines, but that would be starting over. Best I can do now is make sure their computers do not allow automatic updates.....
This is a broad day robbery to block the drives of users who have Windows 10 without any information. I am thinking of taking a case to court against Microsoft for destroying valuable and personal data.
If you dont mind me asking, how did you find your bitlocker recovery key? I cannot find it anywhere and just as you I've never heard of it before!
I agree with you and think a class action case is bound to happen.
